[Name]: Joyce Newstat

[Memory Lane]:

“In 1963, my family moved into a place called Rochdale Village in Jamaica-Queens. It was the first large-scale integrated housing project in New York City– a huge social experiment during the Civil Rights movement. There were twenty buildings, thirteen stories each. Six-thousand families moved in, mostly Jewish and African American. It was 1963, and I was six years old. There was nothing I wanted more than community.” Continue reading →

[Name]: Lindsey Franklin

[Areas of Expertise]: Climate Change, Political Organizing, Sustainability Initiatives for Small Businesses, Community Building

[Memory Lane]:

“There are a couple things I have been really proud of in my life. One was working on the Obama campaign, since it was the first real entrepreneurial thing I’d done. I was placed in a rural Republican county in Michigan, and for the first three weeks my office was a local McDonald’s. I was told to create a network of people who would vote for this presidential candidate: basically, I was tasked to build an organization all by myself, with no budget. By the end, we had a network of 200 active volunteers who were excited about what we were doing. The experience of building a functioning network in very little time, with no budget except my small stipend, was very valuable. I was actually on the phone with my head volunteer yesterday, and he was telling me how their last Democratic meeting was packed with over one hundred people in this small room. It made me feel that I really did something positive.” Continue reading →